Improvised poetry: Palimpsest of drafts

By Jake Marmer

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Jake Marmer, who has consented to the publication of this essay here. — A.F.

I remember listening to Marc Ribot’s band Ceramic Dog, thinking: My entire brain — the main line and the back corners — is burning to grasp this music. That night, the avant-garde guitarist played what was likely an entirely improvised set with three fellow musicians. I tried to follow each new direction the music took, each new interaction that erupted; I was fully consumed in some new state of attention, witnessing all the multiple levels of the work coming together in front of me.

I wanted to improvise poetry as Ribot had improvised his music. It’s not a new idea. Jack Kerouac, like a number of other poets of the Beat era, wrote ecstatic, unedited compositions that felt raw and spontaneous. Kerouac famously explained that he wanted to be known as the “jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jazz session…” But his improvisation was limited to the writing process. Once finished, these poems remained more or less static throughout the publications and poetry readings that followed.

My hope is to write poetry that could then be approached in the way musicians approach their standards — i.e., as frameworks and jumping-off points — poems that are porous enough to become, in each new performance, a new draft, a new radical revision.

Although ancient poetry was oral and therefore more flexible, I found very little room for improvised performance in the contemporary poetry world. Rappers rely on a number of set rhymes and employ a very specific and limiting beat. David Antin, a giant of a poet/thinker, improvises, but his work is situated more along the lines of poetics, rhetoric, and stand-up comedy rather than imagistic, musical poetry.

I am not yet entirely comfortable improvising on stage, but I’m making headway. My goal is never to read a poem the same way twice; at least, I fluctuate with the intonations, tempos, and voices. But the text also changes. Recently, I recorded an album of my poems accompanied by four great musicians: Frank London (trumpet), Greg Wall (sax/clarinet), Uri Sharlin (keys), and Eyal Maoz (guitar). Of the tracks we recorded, a few were scored, but several others came together entirely in the moment. Here is the original text of the poem “Mishnah of Loneliness,” along with the studio recording.

There’re three types of loneliness in the world: green, red, and purple. So says the house of Hillel. In the house of Shammai, they say: loneliness is either black or white; all other types don’t exist and require a sacrifice of a young goat: your internal goat.

Says Rava: in all of my years, I have not known loneliness. All day I’m at the yeshiva with you nudniks, then I come home to groveling domestic tractates. One day, I stepped outside and screamed: Master, I want you in silence, in absence, in wordless music of our solitude! Right then I saw a great ladder, reaching to the Throne up high. The Throne — was empty — but up and down the steps, there went lost sounds, scales of unused and discarded words, slip-ups, swallowed hallucinations, choked on ecstasies — a whole decontextualized orchestra racing like goats through the fog.

The voice said: this, Rava, is the room of my absence, music of our solitude. You like it? Go home! Stuff your ears with pages of sophistry; eat, make a bad pun, for that is the meaning of peace.

While the opening and middle sections of the poem are fairly set, the storytelling segment has room to let loose. As I recite it, I’m looking for openings, ideas, associated images, and commentary that I did not think of when I was working on the original draft.

In this particular piece, I’m also playing with the historical talmudic form, which combined memorization/repetition (“mishnah”) with discourse/discussion/riffing/tangents (“gemarah”).

I can’t say I took the improvisation beyond the confines of the original. But the few images born in the studio felt, by far, more interesting to me than the actual poem. Although I “practiced” the piece several times before the recording, and lines that were better than the original came to me, I resisted the process of revision; I resisted hammering new lines into the poem. Because the oral dimension of the poem became more important, I felt as if it might be better to keep the improvised riffs in the realm of orality — memory — as well. I’d like to think of these several versions of the poem, including the recording, as a series of evolving, living drafts — a performative palimpsest.

ELECTRONIC PEDAGOGY: Magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. "Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis' teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content."

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, "To be modern you don't have to be nuts."

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called "The Creative Campus." To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg's Schindler's List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brings together all of the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, the Chinese/American Poetry Association, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.